Goldman Sachs-backed Attovia Therapeutics files for up to $100 million IPO

Attovia Therapeutics filed its S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission on July 14, seeking up to $100 million in its U.S. initial public offering. The San Carlos, California, company, founded in 2023 and led by chief executive Tao Fu, said there had been no public market for its common stock before this deal.

Goldman Sachs has already had a close view of the company’s financing path. Goldman Sachs Alternatives led Attovia’s $105 million Series B in May 2024, a round the firm said was oversubscribed and which lifted total capital raised since Attovia’s June 2023 launch to $165 million. Goldman Sachs Alternatives managing director Colin Walsh joined Attovia’s board in connection with that financing.

Attovia is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on immune-mediated diseases, built around its ATTOBODY platform for developing precision biologics. Its lead program, ATTO-1310, is described as a potential first-in-class, long half-life anti-IL31 biologic being advanced for atopic dermatitis and other pruritic diseases. The company also has ATTO-002 in development.

In its IPO materials, Attovia highlighted preliminary phase 1b data for ATTO-1310, including a 65% itch-responder rate at week 4 across two dose cohorts and no placebo responders in patients with high-itch atopic dermatitis or chronic pruritus. That is the kind of early readout that can help a clinical-stage biotech get a hearing on Wall Street, but it is still a narrow data set, and the company will need to show investors that the signal can hold up as the program advances.

The filing arrives as biotech IPO activity has started to pick up again, with Apnimed and Kardigan among the recent names moving toward the public market. Even so, Attovia’s debut will be watched less as proof of a broad reopening than as a test of how selective the market still is for healthcare listings.

That selectivity matters for ECM bankers and private-markets teams at Goldman and elsewhere. A Goldman-backed company can get to market when it has fresh cash, a board sponsor and a pitch anchored in clinical data, but Attovia is also stepping into a crowded category. Fierce Biotech said the company is positioning ATTO-1310 as a challenger to Sanofi and Regeneron’s Dupixent and Galderma’s Nemluvio, which means the IPO will help show whether investors are rewarding differentiated assets or just a small number of names with enough momentum to clear the window.